NXT Webinar | How Microsoft 365 is Transforming IT Operations
About This Webinar
Traditional Windows Server based solutions are becoming legacy roadblocks, holding back organizations from meeting the technical demands of leaders and users alike while increasing the risk of a security breach.
IT leaders are becoming frustrated as they can’t keep up with the pace of change and technology advances. We’ve found that frustrated users often go rogue with their IT demands, bypassing the oversight of their IT department. From a security perspective, this presents extraordinary challenges to keep track of information and systems.
In this webinar, Adam and Matt discuss how Microsoft 365 can transform your IT operations and how organizations can take steps towards building a strong cloud foundation that will allow users to harness technology in a way that is both secure and scalable. This starts with moving your Active Directory to Azure which creates a foundation to be able to take advantage of their powerful Endpoint Manager, single sign-on, MFA, cloud-based storage and more!
If you are interested in how to transform your IT operations with Microsoft 365, reach out to schedule a Cloud Readiness Assessment with one of our cloud experts.
Adam Devereaux:
Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to the first 2021 Worksighted NXT webinar.
Adam Devereaux:
Pretty happy to be here. If you haven’t joined one of our webinars in the past, this is an opportunity, a platform for us to be able to kind of talk to the larger audience about important things that are going on in the industry and answer questions that you might have. And hopefully, when you ask questions, you help other people as well.
Matt Maines:
You got me multitasking today. So, I’m your Q&A guy. You let me out from behind the scenes. Now, I got to be in front of the camera.
Adam Devereaux:
You get to be in front of the camera and you got to do the Q&A.
Matt Maines:
All right, all right. I’m ready to go. Let’s go.
Adam Devereaux:
I just wanted to give a shout-out to Steve and Rebecca. Both are a huge part of how we managed to make this work with everything else that’s going on.
Matt Maines:
Nice virtual camera here. I like that, man. Now, I get to be on camera, then you get to be on camera.
Adam Devereaux:
We’re stepping up our game.
Matt Maines:
I like it. I like it.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, exactly. All right, so today, we’re going to be talking about what we call IT operations and the larger trends that are happening in the industry.
The History of IT Operations
Matt Maines:
What is that, IT operations?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. So, I think it’s good to start with a little bit of definition. That’s a little bit of a name I’ve come up with recently to talk about the fact that there are different aspects of technology in an organization, but there’s a big part of IT that is what I would call IT operations. It’s the wires and pipes of technology. It’s the technology, business environment that you create for where your information and people live.
Adam Devereaux:
… it’s the endpoints. It’s where your files live. It’s how you manage those computers. It’s where your user identities live and how you manage that user lifecycle management. Think a little bit of like, when you start a new job, what’s one of the first things that you get?
Matt Maines:
Let’s see, probably my email address, I’m going to say.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, exactly. Your login, right? You got your username and password. Here’s how you get into the computer.
Matt Maines:
I’m not going to lie, it’s been 19 years since my first day of a new job.
Adam Devereaux:
Okay, tell the truth. Do you still have the same password setup?
Matt Maines:
No, absolutely not.
Adam Devereaux:
Okay, all right, all right.
Matt Maines:
Fourteen characters now, a little passphrase action.
Adam Devereaux:
And there’s a lot of shifts, disruptions that are happening in the larger technology industry that are ongoing. The reality is, is that we’re still early in this change that’s happening in our larger world from the technology that we have.
Adam Devereaux:
It’s easy to take this stuff for granted. But I mean, wasn’t that long ago, we didn’t have smartphones. Wasn’t that long ago, the internet wasn’t really a thing. Some of us can remember that.
Matt Maines:
I was beeping on the next aisle and then I couldn’t talk because you were talking.
Adam Devereaux:
The world has changed and software has changed. So much of how we do things, there’s been literal, massive disruptions to certain industries. We can talk about streaming media and transportation and travel industry, hospitality, all these other things.
Adam Devereaux:
But that’s an ongoing thing that’s changing in software and how it works, and the platforms it operates on is changing as well. And the big change is what people refer to as the cloud. The cloud is the big change that we’re all.
Matt Maines:
Right. And I always thought this is interesting because you and I were talking yesterday about the cloud you always thought was just somebody else’s servers, right?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, I even said that in the past.
Adam Devereaux:
At one point, maybe that was kind of true. When you first maybe use like a hosted software or into your line of business apps and you got to use like, the Citrix client, they were just operating that in their cloud. But really, it wasn’t cloud, not like we have now, which is where it’s almost like the world’s computer in a way.
Adam Devereaux:
The cloud platforms, the web platforms that are being developed enable a whole different way of creating and publishing software. And there are pros and cons to these. But the reality is that in the IT operations world, it hasn’t changed that much since 1999.
Matt Maines:
So, let’s say that though, because just think about that. Just take an example. So, like that application, you asked me the first thing was that email address. But I’m telling you, it’s like I had that one, it was my gateway for everything. Now, it’s like I got that cloud app. Now, it might be my email address, but is it the password that ties in?
Matt Maines:
At that beginning part, it was not. It’s another password. It’s another application. It’s another username. Think of the onboarding and creation of that.
Adam Devereaux:
What it was like user on your desktop was kind of like the way you got to that. We roll back that clock to like SBS-2003. There’s probably some of you in the audience that know what we’re talking about here. Maybe there’s a few out there still kicking around.
Adam Devereaux:
That was a big deal for a lot of businesses because it was kind of like this box that you built your business environment inside of. You got a Windows Server. You put it in the building. You had certain networking that was required. You joined the computers to that domain.
Matt Maines:
Service Pack 2 for exchange where I finally got email on my phone, I mean, that was a game changer.
Adam Devereaux:
So, I think another thing we need to talk about is what is active directory. All right. So, it’s kind of like a database of user objects, computer objects, and services that enabled your users to get to resources and for you to kind of control who has access to what. Access security.
Adam Devereaux:
And that’s been such a dominant part of most businesses. And the way that we think of IT and what it is, and a lot of us have learned hands on along the way. And that’s really what we know well, is that active directory, Windows domain environment. You have a Windows endpoint desktop, laptop. You connect it to the server by joining that active directory domain.
Matt Maines:
So, it comes shipped first, a lot of times, like just as a work group, right?
Adam Devereaux:
Work group.
Matt Maines:
Okay. I can talk to 10 computers, got to have the same username and passwords, all that, that SBS kind of gave me that well, now we can all join that domain.
Adam Devereaux:
It was the big leagues.
Matt Maines:
Yeah, absolutely.
Adam Devereaux:
This is the real deal from a business, networking connectivity standpoint. But if we think about that a little more abstract, what we were doing was creating this box, this building, for IT operations for the technology world to live in it.
Adam Devereaux:
And so, we had the edge was the network perimeter. It was the firewall. Our security perimeter was like the walled garden approach is one way to look at that. And that’s where our computers were inside of that. You went into the building. You logged in to the computer. And then you could get to the files. You could get to all those resources, the apps, et cetera.
Matt Maines:
And then I would say the pain point would be is also, and I’m going to open up another office. And at that point, it was like, “Okay, do I have a completely separate one? How do I link the two in?” I mean, we’re like throwing some cable over there and hopefully driving through and give me some bandwidth.
Adam Devereaux:
T1.
Matt Maines:
T1.
Adam Devereaux:
Gen Z, like, what are you guys talking about?
Matt Maines:
I know, I know. You guys have it so good.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, you remember when you had to install Windows XP Service Pack 3 and it took you 45 minutes to get a computer to set up?
Matt Maines:
I don’t want to think about the old days.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. So, software has changed over those last like 20, 25 years, with connectivity, with bandwidth. If you think about it from a software vendor standpoint, that’s what the world was. You had all these businesses out there that had this Windows Server built environment. And so, you want to sell them software and you sold them software that would install into their environment, right?
Matt Maines:
Right, absolutely.
Adam Devereaux:
And then cloud computing really changed a lot with true SaaS. The first step was really just host that application in their environment. Now when we talk about software as a service applications, really that it runs on top of these web platforms on Azure and AWS and the like.
Matt Maines:
So, if you think about it, what’s something that top of mind that comes first SaaS-based applications?
Adam Devereaux:
Like Hotmail.
Gmail.
Matt Maines:
Okay, yeah, that’s totally true.
Adam Devereaux:
You can get to it from a web browser.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. So, what’s been interesting is over those last 10 years, things have changed. Now, we’re living in this connected world. If you kind of look at this image, we had that box we created with the Windows Servers with active directory. And inside of that, we had our files, we had email, we had the security policies that controlled access to those things. It’s how we managed our endpoints and granted them access to the domain.
Adam Devereaux:
And not anyone could do that. You had to be an administrator to connect that computer to your domain. That really was active directory is like that glue that everything’s kind of stored inside of that.
Adam Devereaux:
And then you had business apps. I mean, this is the point. All that other technology is enabling. It’s like this infrastructure you create, but it’s the application ecosystem that really is what allowed businesses to do business. It was your finance software, your CRM, your ERP, or your health record systems, your marketing and maybe estimating design, whatever, that software ecosystem.
Adam Devereaux:
And what’s happened in the last, I don’t know, five, six, seven years, right?
And then, The Cloud
Matt Maines:
Boom. They’re going out to the cloud. Boom, out to the cloud.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, in a lot of cases, it’s the departments that are leading that too. Not necessarily the IT department. The departments themselves are saying, “Hey, we need new finance software. We’re going to move away from QuickBooks on the server. We want Sage, or Intact or something.”
Matt Maines:
Let’s talk about the other thing that I would say some of the finance people don’t like though. I’m going to subscription basis model. So, I was maybe buying that software once every one, two years, maybe an annual support agreement. And now, it’s basically pay per user.
Matt Maines:
But the one thing I do love about that in times that we just came out of like, “Oh, man, business takes a hit, I can shrink those costs.” I mean, that’s huge. I mean, that’s one of the big advantage that we get in subscription.
Adam Devereaux:
You can scale up and down.
Matt Maines:
Absolutely, absolutely.
Adam Devereaux:
Well, there’s another side of that though. And there’s a reason why this methodology has changed so much. And it’s part of a larger shift.
Adam Devereaux:
Think about it from the perspective of if you’re a company that is making software You, the old waterfall release world with what you talked about, like the 2012 release and the 2013 release and the 2014.
Matt Maines:
QuickBooks still does that. Let’s go.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, there’s a lot of software that does, but even if you look at like Office 2007, Office 2010, that’s what we call waterfall release. You have to pay all of your employees a continuous salary to make something that you sell, get a bunch of revenue from, and then maybe you have some sort of service contract on top of that.
Adam Devereaux:
But basically, you had this revenue cycle that was not in line with your cost cycle. And you created these artificial constraints too, where you had to tell people like, “Oh, that feature will be out in a year when the next big release comes out.”
Matt Maines:
We always said they’re waiting, waiting, or maybe give me a service pack in the middle or something like that, that hopefully resolve my bugs.
Adam Devereaux:
And what’s interesting to note is even in operating systems, like OS 10, is finally OS 11 now after how long. Windows 10, I don’t know that there will ever be a release of Windows after Windows 10 because there’s so much variation inside of Windows 10 now. And that’s because we’re moving to a continuous improvement model. Because when you go to a subscription model, they can introduce changes and updates and features, as soon as they’re ready to go. They don’t have to wait for this big release to sell and try to make revenue.
Adam Devereaux:
So, that’s a big reason why with the SaaS world, it’s very subscription based is because it does align to their business needs a lot better. And there are pros and cons, but the reality is, it’s kind of the world we’re living in now.
Matt Maines:
All right, so keep me moving. Okay. So, like I said, some of these cloud apps are going to the cloud. Email is the first one. I think this is really interesting to talk about.
Matt Maines:
So, email I feel like was one of the big first moves. Microsoft deciding to say, kind of almost like, you could see the writing on the wall for exchange, sunsetting that email capacity of bringing that to the cloud.
Adam Devereaux:
Moving to Office 365.
Matt Maines:
Interesting to hear, I was talking with a colleague, I’ll give Jordan Krauss a little shout-out here. But he had a guy that was on that initial team in 22,000 servers was 2010 when they launched this was about the footprint that Microsoft had.
Matt Maines:
Now, we have no idea what that is today. But if you think about that, and that was so small, like nobody was on the platform yet. I mean, I came back from the Mbox days. But it’s just wild to think about it.
Matt Maines:
Yeah. But it’s just wild to think about that. That was 11 years ago now.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. Well, not to toot Microsoft’s horn too much, but a lot of those big players have been in the cloud space for a while. Like Microsoft with Hotmail, Xbox Live, those are some of the first massive cloud platforms that had millions of subscribers or millions of users on them. And that takes them massive, kind of like distributed computing environment to do.
Matt Maines:
Lots of junk mail. Lots of junk mail.
Adam Devereaux:
What was one of the big advantages, as soon as you went to Office 365, we went through that journey with almost all of our customers.
Matt Maines:
I mean, the biggest thing that we had was spam. How did you fight spam? We had a provider that would kind of you’d shift your MX records over there. And then you’d still want to have that email filtering. But the big thing about 365 I would say it was just like that DR set, what do you do when your power goes on your building?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. With single server.
Matt Maines:
Absolutely.
Adam Devereaux:
With single location.
Matt Maines:
And how do I communicate to my customer? I can’t get that quote up on time. But if I can get communication platform of email, that’s huge, to just say, like, “Hey, listen, production is down. We’re going to be a day or two late here.” I didn’t have that communication. I was picking up the phone maybe it’d be like, “Oh, man, Mr. Customer, hey, sorry, we don’t have power right now.” You didn’t have that extra communication line at that point.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. So, immediately, there was like resiliency. It was like you were on an exchange cluster at that point. If my building was down because the internet’s down or power’s down, I could just flip over to my phone or go on.
Matt Maines:
I mean, you got to remember turn that WiFi off, though, still there.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, exactly. But that was a huge benefit for people just to be able to get to their email. It’s not like the service has been like a lot of these cloud platforms, they do have well-publicized outages. But if you charge over those last five, six, seven years, it’s been almost nothing compared to kind of what the average just for people running their own.
Matt Maines:
Absolutely.
Adam Devereaux:
So, why are we talking about all this? And if we look at the reality that so much of the business environment has moved to the cloud, we’ve got people users at home. I mean, basically, what’s happening is this was a trend moving towards more and more cloud access.
Adam Devereaux:
And so, many businesses out there, especially last year, and this move to remote work, they kind of realized either that their server environment wasn’t providing them a lot of value. Or that there were certain limitations, when we start talking about managing endpoints and getting access to files and everything else.
Adam Devereaux:
It’s important to note, everyone’s software ecosystem is different. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’re using software that works really well for you that is a self-hosted version of the software. And there’s ways that you can still move forward with what we’re talking about here in that environment. And everyone’s different.
Matt Maines:
Well, in the shock factor setting, because I would say, okay, work from home at some point was I had a couple of remote staff, I might have said, like, “Hey, I got to go home and pick up a kid early. I’m going to finish and log in late at night.” But I didn’t have that capacity that all of a sudden embark when basically things shut down. It’s like, well, that’s way different. That’s a different capacity load than what I am-
Adam Devereaux:
Different firewall, different bandwidth.
Matt Maines:
Absolutely. And then kind of just dealing with, yeah, all these home internet connections don’t realize that WiFi that I’ve been having issues in the home internet, not so good now. My kids are home, I’ve got to work, that doesn’t going to cut it.
Adam Devereaux:
How many home internet connections got bumped up, right?
Matt Maines:
Absolutely, absolutely.
Adam Devereaux:
The big thing is, essentially, part of this is a conversation around the change with Microsoft and what the platform that they’ve created. Office 365 was something different than what exists now with Microsoft 365.
Adam Devereaux:
And there’s still a lot of people out in the industry, they’ll say, “Well, Azure AD isn’t the same thing as AD.” And we’ll go into that a little bit more. It’s not a direct replacement. And it’s like, a lot of that’s old information at this point. What’s happened is the platform has evolved. And now you have the ability to get rid of that Windows Server-based solution.
Matt Maines:
Well, let’s just talk about the confusion real quick. Because I think that goes into that first slide with email, it existed right there. Office 365, you would have different usernames and different passwords by default.
Matt Maines:
And it was hard to kind of conceptualize, okay, “Well, this is Microsoft, why aren’t these two the same?” And it was actually different than on-prem AD. We’re used to kind of that exchange and that full integration, but there were some tips and tricks and Microsoft’s created a sync client in order to synchronize those accounts. And it’s still in use today in a quite a bit of organization.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. If you’re in Office 365 and you still have Windows Servers, and you’re hosting your own classic Active Directory, and you have an Azure Active Directory right now, those are two different things. Azure Active Directory, Active Directory, classic Active Directory.
Adam Devereaux:
They’re similar, they are both those databases, where users, you create those user accounts, you create those business identities that you give to those users. You register or connect PCs, computers to it. You create security permissions. You can manage those endpoints and host files in it. All of those things that you could do with a Windows Server, you can now do purely with Microsoft 365.
Adam Devereaux:
So, we’re kind of in an interesting stage now because you kind of have three main states. You can have talking about the devices themselves, I get a Windows 10 device. And I join it to classic AD, domain joined as the term there. Before that, it was workgroup joined, as you mentioned.
Matt Maines:
Absolutely.
Adam Devereaux:
That’s how most people’s home computers are set up. You don’t know it, but there’s a workgroup thing of the underlying.
Adam Devereaux:
And then you had hybrid, which is where it’s joined to the domain, but it’s also joined to Azure AD. And now, there’s pure as well, only joined to Azure AD.
Adam Devereaux:
And then there’s other products that Microsoft has that we’ll go into a little bit like Microsoft Endpoint Manager, which really is kind of a game changer with all of this.
Matt Maines:
Absolutely. So, this is interesting. I mean, it’s pretty obvious, but what is the requirement for me to be hybrid join? Because there is something in there so I have to have at least Windows 10.
Adam Devereaux:
Windows 10. That’s a big one. It should be a Windows 10 anyway.
Matt Maines:
Well, I know, release date like I could even look it up to see but, man, Windows 10 has been out there for a while.
Adam Devereaux:
I think Windows 7 went end of life in January 2019. Does that sound right?
Matt Maines:
Sounds something right.
Adam Devereaux:
Let’s see how good my memories here.
Matt Maines:
I know.
Adam Devereaux:
So, one of the questions here might be okay, we’re kind of describing this as the problem, what’s wrong with Windows Server based solutions? What’s wrong with classic Active Directory?
Matt Maines:
So, we’re coming up on six years, July 29th 2015, Windows 10, first came out.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. And Windows 7 came out like 14 years.
Matt Maines:
Let’s be honest, we shipped with Windows 7, but we had the rights upgrade for Windows 10. Dell did that for us. And finally, everyone’s nervous to change because Windows 7 was so solid. But we didn’t have any of these hybrid benefits at that time.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, this is really a lot has changed just in the last few years that enables us to move away from those Windows Server based solutions.
Adam Devereaux:
So, again classic AD, what’s the problem here? Well, it’s 22 years old at this point. It came out in 1999. And we don’t party like we did in 1999 anymore. The world has changed a bit. The global connectivity, the fact that so much of our information and we have this different application ecosystem. And the security model had flaws all along this walled garden classic security model, this implicit trust model, when something got inside that walled garden, it kind of had access to things you didn’t want it to have access to. We’re shifting to it’s kind of a buzzword in term, but a zero trust model.
Adam Devereaux:
And Active Directory was never, ever designed for the world that we live in. That was designed around this trusted network model, where it is something that is not suitable to function over the public Internet. It’s built on protocols, Kerberos, and NTLM, and all these other things that-
Matt Maines:
A lot of buzzwords.
Adam Devereaux:
It’s stuff that doesn’t work on the internet as we have it now. You can’t let your computer talk directly to it over the internet. You got to use VPN clients. It’s got to be in the network otherwise.
Adam Devereaux:
And a lot of people realize like, “Man, I got people at home. Do I really want to open up my corporate network to all of their home networks via VPN, one way or another.” People using their personal computers, there’s just all have these security concerns.
Adam Devereaux:
And it was providing about as much value as some of those old school phone systems that are sitting desks on people’s or phones on people’s desks, and nobody’s there to answer them. It really has kind of pushed the bar forward and a realization of why there’s limitations with classic Active Directory. And some of the benefits we haven’t even really gotten into yet with Microsoft 365.
Matt Maines:
I’m ready. I’m ready. Let’s get the answer. Done with the problem, give me the answer.
Adam Devereaux:
Here’s the why, Microsoft 365 is an enterprise platform that you can build your business on top of, you can build a secure business environment. and you can even extend these business identities further into this application ecosystem that you have, using single sign-on, cloud app security, and all of these other things that we’ll talk about in later webinars as well. It is the new enterprise cloud platform that Microsoft has built that does not require Windows Server based solutions.
Adam Devereaux:
And some of the things that it enables, we would kind of call it classic IT versus modern IT. In classic IT, it was very built around single devices in the building business owned. You have that corporate network, very manual. And it requires a lot of high touch interactions. And as organizations are scaling or there’s efficiency concerns, it really has been a major limiter.
Adam Devereaux:
In modern IT, we need to be much more limber. We need to be able to have people switch between devices quickly, be able to onboard and bring new devices. Let’s have people self-service for password resets and adding applications. And how do we automate as much as possible and get our business kind of technology environment, kind of around this larger application ecosystem and build a really solid IT operations platform.
Matt Maines:
So, specific example. This is one that I’m walking a lot of people through right now is I would say if I go to the classic IT model, it was Windows File Explorer. That’s how I got to my network drive.
Matt Maines:
Also, now I go into the modern IP world and I talk about using Microsoft Teams. And Teams, I can get it on where you exactly say single device versus multi device. That same familiarity, I’m on my desktop, I log in to my say in my Windows phone, that same file access my recent files is the same on my phone as it is on my, I don’t care if it’s my Mac, my PC or my web portal is the same way to access those files. And that’s huge. That’s absolutely huge.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. Let’s talk about the other big competitor or other business environment out there, G Suite. Google was starting from a very different world because it didn’t have the Windows operating system and the Windows Server legacy.
Adam Devereaux:
So, G Suite Google, it’s kind of this first iteration around. They’ve got a lot of traction in education. And there are businesses that use that platform. Microsoft 365, in our opinion has some significant advantages for businesses. But it’s basically the new Microsoft platform that functions in the same way that was designed for cloud first. And it truly can be a ground up replacement for classic Active Directory and that Windows Server based environment.
Adam Devereaux:
And that’s a scary thing for a lot of people. Because there’s so many new things to learn. And it’s tough. There’s kind of like a crisis in IT right now. Because we’ve grown up in this Windows Server based environment. And a lot of us that built labs at home and set up a domain controller in the basement and all that stuff, we’ve gotten older, we’ve got families, we’ve got other things that we need to put our time.
Matt Maines:
But you still have to get work done. But it might be done in gaps. So, it’s not like, “Okay, I have a little flex in here because you got to grab a kid, but I need to log back in and have the same efficiency as I did at 3:00 versus 6:00.” And I would say the workforce is adjusting.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, but let’s talk about the how. Let’s talk about the specifics. We’re here to help you understand, there is a mapping. There is a bridge between the old understanding of what these systems were and the new understanding.
Adam Devereaux:
This gets a little bit into the weeds on the techie side here, but classic Active Directory, now you have Azure Active Directory, largely performs the same sort of function. Group policies, now you’ve got conditional access. Your firewall, those conditional access policies are really the new firewall because in a cloud world, your user identities are your real security perimeter.
Matt Maines:
You want to say you say who you say you are.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, exactly.
Matt Maines:
Absolutely.
Adam Devereaux:
You want to be able to make sure that when your users or your user accounts are accessing company information, it’s really the people that should be accessing those things. User account compromise, user account takeover, however you want to talk about it, that’s one of the biggest problems out there right now for businesses. It’s one of the biggest security vulnerabilities and risks that we see.
Matt Maines:
So, talk a little bit, give me a little detail if you can of conditional access. Because we hear about that, and I know we throw along the buzz term of MFA, so multifactor authentication, and why maybe that isn’t enough all the time. Give me a specific example. I’m looking for I guess I’ll just say it. But you can have MFA and think you’re safe. But there’s some gotchas. Probably the biggest one we talk about is basic authentication. So, explain a little bit how that might skirt around, if you don’t mind?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, the reality is, is because there are old protocols and old operating systems, old ways things to connect.
Matt Maines:
So, we’ve talked about it like getting into exchange like POP3, SMTP those names.
Adam Devereaux:
Those are basic office term, legacy authentication protocols, those are all going away. Microsoft is eliminating support for those. But if you still haven’t turned on, it’s a huge security vulnerability. Even if you have MFA enabled, you need to have basic authentication disabled. And that’s a big thing that our security team is working with people on doing because it’s pretty high touch. Users may have to make a few changes.
Adam Devereaux:
But the biggest thing with conditional access is this supports the zero trust security model. This enables moving to an environment where I’m looking at lots of bits of information, where’s the user coming from? Are they coming from a known device, a trusted device? Are they coming from an area, a region, user behavior, all these things before access is granted to any file or service in the cloud?
Adam Devereaux:
So, conditional access is very powerful. But even at a basic setup, it can give you a lot of capabilities to just make sure that the people who are accessing information you can trust that they are who they say they are.
Adam Devereaux:
And then the other big one, of course, is file storage in Office 365. We go back to that kind of like, where a lot of companies are left now. Nearly all of the line of business applications have moved to cloud based. Somewhat disjointed in some cases, because there are applications that are-
Matt Maines:
They have their own storage, right?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah.
Matt Maines:
Adobe is a great example, Creative Cloud, buy the software subscription. And for $15 a month, you get PDF editor and a little bit of cloud storage, really? And then Microsoft will come in with their business premium stack at $20 and give you all sorts of things.
Adam Devereaux:
So, way more for the money.
Matt Maines:
Way more. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. In a lot of cases, those apps were picked by the department for their own needs. You kind of have this different sort of app ecosystem now. But you’re left with the big kind of three functions, Active Directory. So, it’s your user identities and your device management. Its files and print. Those are kind of the big things that the server is left doing.
Adam Devereaux:
And files are one of the hairiest because if you look at files over the years, so many of us have that old network share that been there for 10,15 years.
Matt Maines:
Filing cabinet that keeps on getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, exactly. And that’s something we could kind of go in depth because the engagement the process to we can take this opportunity and say, but why? What do you really need? How are you using files? Where should they live? And help understand in Microsoft 365, how that can be different.
Adam Devereaux:
And when we talk about the user state management and device management, what’s really awesome there is when you move to that device management world Microsoft Endpoint Manager, that was kind of the last thing there. That’s what really allows you to do low touch or zero touch deployment of computers. You can push out policies and applications. And we start getting into that automation.
Adam Devereaux:
And what that looks like is you onboard a new user. You put a title, HR says, “Hey, we need this estimator to be hired.” So, that goes into the user properties. There’s a dynamic group that adds them to the estimator group. There are applications that are assigned to the estimator group. And when they log in to a computer, those applications automatically get either pushed down to the computer, or they get access to them through my apps, through a web portal to get to all the applications.
Adam Devereaux:
So, that’s pretty awesome. And it just grows from there in terms of being able to move. A lot of people remember roaming profiles, where you could go from one computer to another. Now, with OneDrive, Enterprise State Roaming, Autopilot, all those things, the amount of time it takes to actually deploy a computer for a user can be shrunk massively, where you can literally drop ship somebody a computer, they sign in as themselves. And it takes a little while, but everything gets pushed to that computer and set up.
Matt Maines:
So, do me a favor, because this one is hard, Microsoft, cloud file storage.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah.
Matt Maines:
Okay. Well, I’ve got OneDrive client on my desktop.
Adam Devereaux:
Yes.
Matt Maines:
So, that’s my OneDrive data. And then I think the other thing that is hard to then remember is, when I start going into multiple people want to collaborate with me. That’s SharePoint backend. I would say there’s two main buckets there.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. My files.
Matt Maines:
Yup. Absolutely. Your files.
Adam Devereaux:
I’m hitting my mic here.
Matt Maines:
your case, yes. I know. And then I would say like that SharePoint back end. There’s other cloud stuff, too. You’ll hear like Azure Blob Storage or like Azure Files and stuff like that.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, that’s really more for archival usage or application usage. When it comes to the new file server, you basically have OneDrive and SharePoint. And also, Teams is in there. But you can think of Teams as almost like the file explorer.
Matt Maines:
Like I said earlier, the file explorer. So, that’s how in Teams, I can get into my OneDrive data, I can also get into my SharePoint data. Using Teams is like a file explorer.
Adam Devereaux:
Yes. And it’s a way you can structure. Again, we’ve done a webinar on this before, and we could definitely do another one. But the easiest way to think about it, yeah, always the best way to kind of think about it is OneDrive is like your home drive. That’s like your My Docs in desktop and literally OneDrive can sync your My Docs and desktop, so that can be your My Docs and desktop.
Matt Maines:
That gives me endpoint backup. That has been a struggle for years, right?
Adam Devereaux:
Right. Such a game changer.
Matt Maines:
Broken laptop down, got stolen, got all my files, what am I going to do? Like, Oh, I thought you were saving on the network drive there, Adam.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, exactly. Now, we know this is a little verbal. We’re going to be doing some more demos over the content over the next couple of months. We got some great videos that the team is working on right now to kind of show the day in the life, the experiential differences that are pretty substantial.
Adam Devereaux:
When we’re working with files in the cloud, one of the big ones being, again, that file lives in that cloud service. And whatever endpoint I’m on is just a way to kind of get to that.
Adam Devereaux:
So, even if I’m on my phone like, here’s the PowerPoint that we’re working on for this webinar, so I can just tap that on my phone and access it. And I can be in it at the same time as on my laptop and working on the same file.
Matt Maines:
Live at it.
Adam Devereaux:
But I don’t need to go into something even. It’s like boom, popped up recent files. I need to share it with somebody, make a quick little change. It’s very easy, very dynamic.
Matt Maines:
I want to go into a little bit something if you don’t mind, because I think another thing that we talked about too was kind of like BYOD. And how do you make sure that that data is intact when accessing a phone?
Matt Maines:
And typically, you would have done like a mobile device management software. It would have been like AirWatch on here and the users are like, “Man, just drains my battery.” But I had to ensure that data was safe on the phone. But talk a little bit about-
Adam Devereaux:
You do the corporate owned devices, personal device.
Matt Maines:
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Adam Devereaux:
So, that’s part of the power of Microsoft Endpoint Manager. And there are more capabilities than what just domain joint could be. And it does work with it’s a full MDM solution. It does work with iOS devices, Android devices, all these things, but it also enables application management, so, mobile application management.
Adam Devereaux:
It’s kind of like this in between, where I have no control to MDM, where I can basically have a sandbox for my information on a user’s personal device. I can control, make sure that it’s encrypted, that they have a pin to access it. If the device stops talking to the server, the information is wiped, I can do a remote wipe of just the business information.
Adam Devereaux:
It’s really cool because it enables businesses to have security of their information on user’s personal devices without having to manage that device, which was always such the biggest problem.
Matt Maines:
So, talk about that. Give me something specific. So, a good app would be Outlook. Because maybe before I was on my iOS device and I natively used active sync to sync my mail and my contacts. But now, I always say, my home screen, this was going to be hard, but it updated. Now, I have Teams, I have Outlook, and I have Messenger and I have my phone. Before, I think it was browser, maybe text message, and just like the old school email. And now, it’s like the container of Outlook and explain a little bit that data doesn’t actually live on the phone.
Adam Devereaux:
No, it really doesn’t live on the phone at that point. You might deal with a few files being synced and the like, but you can control all of that with mobile application management. It’s really just a front end to the cloud platform.
Adam Devereaux:
And whether I’m opening a file in PowerPoint on my desktop app or Word on my desktop app, or I’m opening it on my phone or in the web browser, it’s all the same. I’m accessing that file in the cloud and I can do simultaneous editing and everything else.
Adam Devereaux:
But with mobile application management, I can do simple things like make it so that when I launched my Outlook, it requires a face ID for me to be able to get into it. When I open up Microsoft Office and I open up Word, I can copy information from my notes or web browser into Word, but I can’t copy from Word into my notes application on my phone. So, it kind of is that firewall for that corporate information on the personal device.
Adam Devereaux:
But I think you bring up a good point there in terms of the dynamic kind of business identity and being able to control what people are able to access. Because the next big thing is really around…
Matt Maines:
File security.
Adam Devereaux:
… file security.
Matt Maines:
Containers.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. The big problem in the past, when we talk about that network share, what are some of the problems that arose that you?
Matt Maines:
Let’s say, I’m in accounting, and then I have been granted access to the accounting folder. And let’s say I was working on the 2019 budget, okay. And then I can just go ahead and email that file out because I have access to it. But what happens to the file security when it leaves the organization?
Adam Devereaux:
Right. The folder that file was in have permissions on it and I was given access to and other people were not. But as soon as you email that file, those permissions are gone because the permissions and the security was on the containers of the files. And what would happen? People would accidentally click and drag things out of where they were supposed to be. And suddenly people had access to things.
Matt Maines:
Your file moved.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, they email it to the wrong recipients. So, now, people have access, and it’s gone, that file is gone. It’s out there. You don’t have it anymore. It’s been sent through the email system. It’s now in their inbox. You’re stuck. You’ve got files on somebody’s computer and it gets stolen.
Adam Devereaux:
There’s all of these challenges around files. People are copying stuff down to their local desktop, and all those permissions are gone. They can do whatever they want with it at that point. Because all we ever did was secure the containers and we didn’t really know what people were doing inside of them.
Adam Devereaux:
So, information labeling goes so much further than that because I can classify, I can create different classifications of documents and say, it’s almost like the equivalent of the permissions before. I can say, “Hey, Matt, you can open this file because you’re a member of the accounting group.”
Matt Maines:
But one thing I really like about it is I think this really opens up the case to when a file is collaborated with multiple people, it drives value of that file for the organization. It’s really an asset of the company. And in that traditional file system, you really can’t tell how many people are working on it. You can’t have it open at the same time. We can’t collaborate.
Matt Maines:
But now that I have a file and I say five or six people are working on it, X number of changes, their salary per hour, that file has worked because you want to protect that.
Adam Devereaux:
Yup, exactly. So, in this new environment where we’re labeling, let’s say that you have that file, you have access to it because it’s accounting and you email it to somebody that you’re not supposed to as an attachment. With file information protection, with file classification, they can’t open it. It’s encrypted. Unless they have access, they have the permissions to open it. It doesn’t matter where that file goes, they cannot open it. And that’s pretty huge. That’s powerful. It’s a huge enabler of just peace of mind.
Matt Maines:
Because I think one thing skirted around a lot of time is data loss protection. They’re like, “Well, you know what’s going to stop somebody from plugging in a USB drive? Sure, we disabled the USB ports. But now I need a webcam and that’s a pain because that was on my USB port.”
Matt Maines:
So, some of those traditional protection, or I would say a lot of things too was like, we just want to put in these controls, these box, lock down something so you could do anything at certain times. Now, it’s like, you got to have the flexibility to be able to do that. And then giving this type of security helps with one of those voids that happened before.
Adam Devereaux:
Exactly. All right. Well, we’ve said a lot of things. Is there anything in particular that we should mention before we get questions here?
Matt Maines:
I was going to say we got to-
Adam Devereaux:
We’ve gone down a couple of rabbit holes.
Matt Maines:
Yes, absolutely.
Adam Devereaux:
If you can hear the ice falling off a roof out there, but it’s quite the show.
Matt Maines:
Well, I do have to say one thing. So, I know you get into this, but winter tires so makes a big difference.
Adam Devereaux:
It does make a big difference, initially, right?
Matt Maines:
Right. But I would also say too, now that you have these hybrid. We talked about hybrid join. It’s the modernization of winter tires.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, they have these new winter tires that are kind of a hybrid between all season and winter. Or they’re not really winter tires. You can have them on your car year round. It makes a difference. They’re pretty good.
Matt Maines:
But I think one of the last things that I think to talk about is going back to all these apps and talk about basically the sprawl of applications and those identities.
Matt Maines:
And you came back to the very first question you asked me. What’s one of the first things that I get when I start a new position via an email address? So, we’ll talk a little bit about just that last time and to say like, where is that central identity coming from? How do you connect the accounts? How do you try to bring that in? What’s my road path to get there to kind of start working towards that single identity?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, I think one of the big things is that people need to understand that they can start taking advantage of that now. A lot of it has to do with the apps you use. But lots and lots of I’d say the majority of business software as a service cloud apps support something called single sign-on.
Adam Devereaux:
And that really is such an enabler for kind of this next generation of user provisioning. And the way that we manage the lifecycle of these users and the automation around it, kind of the dream is HR-driven user provisioning, where through as much automation as possible, all of the access that user account gets created, the user account the other systems get created.
Adam Devereaux:
But the root of that with single sign-on is, I don’t have to create an account in every one of these other applications that I need access to, really, I have my one business identity. It’s secured with multifactor authentication and conditional access. And then that is what I use to then get into the other applications as well.
Adam Devereaux:
And even if your hybrid, where you have on-prem applications, if you’re self-hosting applications, you can kind of bring them into that world as well. You’re not out in the cold because you have your own apps, self-hosted apps. As you move into this direction, you can move the endpoints and business identities and everything else to be Azure AD focus and take advantage of all these things we’ve talked about.
Adam Devereaux:
And you can kind of like almost containerize or app host your own applications. Use things like Windows Virtual Desktop, and RemoteApp publishing and the web client and things like that. And put it into that same security model, where you kind of isolate that server environment where the apps live and make it more secure for users to access those things.
Adam Devereaux:
And again, everybody’s at a different place with this. The reality is there are a lot of companies out there that still have self-hosted apps that are really, really critical, and they’ve invested in them. And then they have quite a future with those.
Adam Devereaux:
But over time, this continues to shift and more and more businesses are in that place where most of their apps are cloud based and single sign-on is a real cornerstone to making that more secure and easier for your users.
Adam Devereaux:
Because now, they don’t have to manage 20 different logins. We start talking about password managers. Well, single sign-on is kind of like a password manager in a way because you’re giving them that business identity. And it doesn’t even have to be a single sign-on app. There are other ways that you can make those secure behind that as well.
Matt Maines:
That’s right, and just even that URL, myapplications.microsoft.com, I mean, even when I’m a 365 subscriber that is what I would call the modern desktop. And that’s kind of the way that once you kind of log in to that platform, that gives me that website.
Matt Maines:
So, even today, just logging in mine, we’ve got a password manager there that synchronize, the Meraki portal at sync and there’s kind of our bonus lead program, our HR stuff that’s in there. But again, it’s my go-to portal to kind of launch my cloud-based applications.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. So, we didn’t really talk about this too much at the beginning, but I use the term IT operations and technology enablement.
Adam Devereaux:
People talk about digital transformation. It’s a big buzzword going on right now that the reality of what digital transformation is, is really focused around businesses truly adapting how they do things to what technology enables. And that’s not usually the first step. Digital transformation is kind of like this future state for most companies. Usually, most businesses just kind of digitize what they’re doing now.
Adam Devereaux:
So, what do we need to get to that point that technology is truly an enabler for the business, and it doesn’t feel like a hindrance, and you have to free up. You have to make it operations more streamlined, more efficient, more productive. It’s still critical. It’s kind of like the building that your business is in and ignoring COVID in a lot of businesses. The building is important, right?
Matt Maines:
Absolutely.
Adam Devereaux:
But it also is something that is … It’s not what I do in my day to day. That building is just a container for my business. And it’s critical if there’s a problem with the building like this fire, flooding, mold, bugs, whatever else.
Matt Maines:
But let’s talk about the big picture here. Because I would say one of the biggest goals that we have is you go back to that original site. We talked about that corporate network bubble. Now, we’ve had people access things outside the bubble.
Matt Maines:
But what you want to do is really work towards building less dependency on that office. So that could be from anywhere from it’s hosting still like CAD licensing, it could be, like you said, it’s still hosting the files, that if I don’t have access to that building, my work impact is minimized. I think that’s something that is huge and just working towards little bit at a time and keep working on getting those dependencies underneath the building.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, because it takes a lot to make that physical environment in the buildings secure, reliable, and some businesses have done that well or they’ve invested in that. But it’s really not just about what’s worked well up to this point. But it’s about what we need going forward and what these cloud platforms can enable us to do.
Matt Maines:
And I would say, like through this though too, looking back a year ago, how much acceleration has had towards that in 12 months. So, it’s, again of the huge benefits of forcing the people to work from home to actually bring it to the light of like, wow, when I have the whole staff at home, it’s painful. How can we make it better?
Adam Devereaux:
Make a better experience, more efficient.
Matt Maines:
I would say through this, too, Microsoft has stepped up its game. Now, they have the tool sets that are there to enable this platform.
Adam Devereaux:
But it’s not easy, it’s a transition.
Matt Maines:
It’s a transition, absolutely.
Adam Devereaux:
We’re here to help you through that. But it is a big change both from an IT operations and those people who are responsible for that. Really, this can be a huge blessing. But it seems a little scary right now because it’s a big change.
Matt Maines:
It does and it changes the way that people work. I think it was the same thing before when what happens now, I thought the same thing of a worker that would say when they’re in the building, I just assume they’re getting their job done right.
Matt Maines:
And all of a sudden, I sent him home and what happens when you’ll have metrics when you don’t have goals for that person? You think just because they’re in the building, they were doing their job. But now, all of a sudden they’re sent home, it’s like how do we do it? So, I mean, that’s absolutely perfect.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, we had some environments where when everyone was working at home, there were some people that were looking for a way to kind of keep track of whatever user was doing. Is there some software that tells us what our users are doing their job or not? Not really, not really, not like you want. What you really were lacking previously was a way through your technology to understand the workload, whether or not people were getting done what they need to get done, and their productivity and efficiency.
Matt Maines:
Well, I love this because Mark, thank you for this question. So, Mark says here, 95% of our files are old. I would say that’s very common. And then, and then he goes on to say, and probably won’t be used again. So, it seems like we should look at our processes and make sure the files that are saved today everyday should be moved to the cloud first. Now today, they used map drives. What would we use under the cloud model?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, it’s a great question. So, the first thing that you do is clean up.
Matt Maines:
It’s just like file cabinet.
Adam Devereaux:
Before you move, delete. Only move over what makes sense to move over to your production file environment. It’s a little bit like, let’s say your garage is such a mess, that rather than clean it, you build a new garage. Only take out the things you want and just wrap police tape around the other one. That’s kind of what we’re talking about here.
Adam Devereaux:
And this is an opportunity, it is a challenge, but it’s an opportunity to greatly improve the way that we operate. And the simple answer is that you’d build this new home for files in the cloud like Teams and SharePoint, OneDrive. And you would take that 95% and archive it in some way. And there are multiple ways to do that. You can archive it and cloud storage. You mentioned Azure Files, that’s a great place for that, for example.
Adam Devereaux:
But the big thing is only move over what you need to move over, not move over the legacy. You can’t just take what you have and just dump it on the cloud. You don’t want to just have this cloud dump of files.
Matt Maines:
And you talked about that, too, because I would say the other thing, too, is remember their permissions? We came from containers.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. And nested permissions and permissions and permissions.
Matt Maines:
Yes, you got to take the time to actually tag those files. And the same thing, too, I always say the easiest spot to start first is with user data. Everyone has kind of like an H drive, go through it. Find out what you really need, and then move that stuff over to OneDrive. But at the same time, too, you’re going to protect their desktop, their documents, their picture files. I mean those things are huge.
Matt Maines:
And that brings us into this, I would say great transition into Alex’s question here. Like you were talking about the on-prem solution and the server and with that, we’re excited, we’re a big advocate of a good backup platform to recover from.
Adam Devereaux:
Right, absolutely.
Matt Maines:
So, I think this is a really good question. So, Alex asked the question here, do backup solutions like Datto become obsolete when moving network drive to the cloud? How to remain historical backups and versions of files that were stored in the cloud?
Matt Maines:
So, leading to that, that data there was to protect your on-prem server. That box there was a hybrid backup. It would backup and then send to the cloud, have your nice offsites. It gave us a really nice what I would call recovery point objectives. I know how far back I could go. It came with a subscription model to give you that. And then you had recovery time objectives of how fast you could get this infrastructure back, say like ransomware was a-
Adam Devereaux:
That was not trivial, right? In some cases, backup could take hours or days.
Matt Maines:
Hours or days, how are you going to present eight, 10 terabytes of data instantly. And Datto, I would say had a pretty good solution that we present that and then it’s about how do I get back to that organization?
Matt Maines:
So, is there a gap? And I would say that Datto also has a product called Datto SaaS Protection. So, Datto SaaS Protection, same way, almost like your backups, it takes snapshots of your email boxes four times a day that gives you point in time backup recovery.
Matt Maines:
So, a good example here is, oops, I deleted a client folder. And I need that folder structure back. Microsoft natively could give me those files back, but it wouldn’t give me back that folder structure. But now we talk about that second phase. What about my OneDrive data? Now, I have all this user stack in there.
Adam Devereaux:
SharePoint, OneDrive.
Matt Maines:
SharePoint, OneDrive, the Team Structure. So, again, just one extra seat of that Datto SaaS Protection protects that whole environment. So, now that protects my SharePoint files. And then I would say that there’s some good stuff in Microsoft.
Adam Devereaux:
It’s important to understand what Microsoft has from protection standpoint.
Matt Maines:
Yes. There’s recycle bins that you can turn on recycle.
Adam Devereaux:
You kind of qualifies as a worm model. Write once, read many. And inherently you have file versioning as well. So, when you have files stored in SharePoint, you can see previous versions, you can restore those files.
Matt Maines:
But the problem is like, what did that environment look like six months ago?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah.
Matt Maines:
What happened. So, again, that’s where the kind of the backup piece comes into play and says, “Hey, I can look at this point in time.”
Matt Maines:
And the other thing, I want to say real quick about this, because I think this is often kind of confused but we used to use the term “archiving.” So, this is archiving or journaling. So, we talked about backups and mail. So, just remember that backups of mail is point in time. So, there’s gaps in between there. So, when I talk about it automatically snaps backups four times a day, there is gaps.
Matt Maines:
So, there is a journaling solution if you would need something to capture any message that went inside and outside the organization, or within some of the higher 365 stacks. There’s legal hold that can fulfill some of those gaps.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, absolutely. There are a lot of organizations that based on what Microsoft has built into the platform, they function with just that. But there are scenarios that arise that a third party backup solution would be helpful, would improve the capabilities or the timeframes that are involved there.
Adam Devereaux:
And so, they really can be beneficial. But if you’re worried, if I just move files up to SharePoint to Teams is that a huge risk stuff could get deleted, blah, blah, blah, the reality is that you have a lot of controls, and you can set legal retention and all these things that prevent files from really ever being deleted.
Adam Devereaux:
So, there’s not an inherent risk immediately. It’s not like you’re putting it on a server that’s not backed up. But there are additional protections, there are gaps. So, that’s kind of a conversation around your data environment. And whether or not a solution like that would bring a lot of value. They’re fairly cost effective as well.
Matt Maines:
Absolutely.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. That’s a great question.
Matt Maines:
Thanks, Alex, appreciate that.
Adam Devereaux:
You had started to talk about with data, how we move the information and putting them into an archive. And I think one of the things to think about too with files, it’s kind of like a basic question. But why do you have those files? Why are those files? Are they part of a business process? Are they a file that people are collaborating on?
Adam Devereaux:
I’m not saying that files are going to disappear. But it’s also an opportunity to look at like, why do we have that Excel document? Or is it making up for failure in our application ecosystem, that we’re creating almost like a program in Excel? Or do we need to save all of these files as we go along? Is there a better way to do it? Should they live inside of a program? You kind of have to understand the flow of business through your organization, essentially.
Matt Maines:
And I would say, a good example that goes back to is looking at, say, CAD files, for example. They’re just too big or it’s not cost effective for me to put them in the cloud. But again, I go back to that main principle of what you want to work towards is getting less dependency on that main office. So, is it synchronizing maybe those are synchronizing to Azure, and then the branch servers, just a file cache, or you’re relying on another office to have those files.
Matt Maines:
So, again, you just really want to start minimizing the impact that a single office would have on the organization.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, and in many cases, those are those cases, too, where you really have to take a close look at how you’re doing things. That is the thing I’ll say about the file server. It was kind of like a Swiss Army knife. You just threw everything on there. It doesn’t matter what it was used for and by who. And it takes a more nuanced approach with cloud storage to make sure that you’re building the right home for your information.
Matt Maines:
And that goes, again, to application discovery. Look for those apps that directly plug into Office 365, it directly plugs into SharePoint, it can be my cloud file, because before you just had that software platform was loaded on the server, and that just came with file storage.
Matt Maines:
So, it’s important when doing some application selection to see what kind of integration or when we talked about the identities, are they managed? Is it like Azure AD native? Or is it at least have SAML connection so I can get those user accounts under that single point of identity.
Adam Devereaux:
Which is free. That Microsoft licensing, that’s one of the biggest problems that can be complicated.
Matt Maines:
Yes, absolutely.
Adam Devereaux:
But at this point, now, single sign-on is included that all tiers of Azure AD. So, if you’re off on Office 365, we can help you or you can set up single sign-on to some of your applications right now. It doesn’t require you to make all these other changes.
Adam Devereaux:
But I guess to close out, when we look at the, again, the theme, the larger theme of what we’re talking about here and kind of in upcoming webinars is really that idea of IT operations and the disruption and change that is happening in that and what we really talked about today, versus technology enablement.
Adam Devereaux:
And how do we as technology resources in a company or just the larger organization get the right program in place to continually improve the adoption of technology.
Adam Devereaux:
Again, we’re moving from this waterfall release thing, where the point was to get this platform as a certain version out in the hands of the users to people weren’t really fully taking advantage of what technology can do. That’s not going to be a way for competitive differentiation through technology just to use boilerplate technology.
Adam Devereaux:
So, it’s almost like a different discipline, it’s a different mentality. We have to reach out to the departments, meet them where they’re at, understand what they’re trying to do, and align the technology to that.
Matt Maines:
So, my last point I want to get into is, it’s a lot different. When we talked about IT operations, we slammed in that server. I’d walk away, maybe everything looks the same, you don’t even know things upgraded. Okay.
Adam Devereaux:
Because you’re on that release.
Matt Maines:
I could get a release, maybe it’s just a new version. And then at the last point, then now when I’m doing this, it is constantly it’s small changes, incremental changes, and with that, what you need to really invest in is training. Making sure that people understand the change, why they change and are they using the technology as efficiently as possible?
Adam Devereaux:
Are they taking advantage of the capabilities? Because even when we start talking about files, as soon as this is what’s interesting about Microsoft 365, is because it starts to span across that divide of IT infrastructure and technology enablement platform because soon as I get that file in SharePoint, now I can start using Power Automate. I can start using flow.
Matt Maines:
Another webinar, another webinar. Got to go.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. We can automate the heck out of that stuff. Some pretty awesome capabilities there.
Adam Devereaux:
All right, so closing out. Thanks everyone for attending. We will be trying to shoot for another webinar next month. Again, if you have any idea-
Matt Maines:
Demos, demos.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, we’ll try to get a little more demo heavy. You got a bear with us, we’re a little rusty. And we don’t have kind of exactly what we’re going to talk about next time figured out. So, appreciate any feedback, but it’s continuing on this theme of the IT operations and the changes there.
Matt Maines:
Awesome.
Adam Devereaux:
A lot of exciting stuff, a lot of great conversations ahead and we really appreciate your time today and jumping on board. Thanks everyone.
Worksighted Team
We are a team of over-enthusiastic people, ready to help our clients utilize technology to spur growth! We love technology and come to work every day eager to solve problems and find ways to impact our clients.
